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Six years ago today, I hit “publish” or whatever it was called at the time on a blog post:

With a goal to tie my technology, culture, caffeine, and gadget history, experience, and sometimes expertise together in something that was entertaining and useful to read, I launched rsts11 on January 28, 2011.

Over a hundred posts later, it’s still chugging along. Along the way, I’ve butted heads with some vendors about online behavior and firmware availability and the definition of the word “free,” shared my Tech Field Day experiences until I was no longer able to do so, announced my migration to the dark side when I retired from system administration to work in a sales organization at a vendor (which is why I was no longer able to be a TFD delegate), brought you coffee and gadgets, and most recently on New Year’s Eve 2016, spawned a travel-focused blog with a slightly less technical focus than rsts11 itself.

I’ve had a number of great experiences made possible by the blog, including participating in Interop, the Spectra Summit, Asigra’s partner summit, and a few other things here and there. I’ve managed to keep a bit of my independent presence despite working for a megalithic technology company, and it’s helped me keep my tech chops at least lukewarm in between fifty person WebEx calls to discuss whether to have another meeting with a different fifty people… you know how it goes.

So where do we go from here?

What’s ahead for the next hundred posts? I’ve decided that I really need to stop buying gear “to write about on the blog” until I catch up on the room full of stuff I have to catch up on already. Some of the next hundred posts will be on rsts11travel of course, including some hotel reviews (and some better photos, which might mean some return visits to a couple of hotels). And I’m still pondering the video blog or podcast idea, although I’d need to come up with a lot more interesting stuff to talk about off the cuff.

Do you have suggestions for upcoming posts? Weird gear ideas for me to investigate? A favorite post from rsts11 that’s helped you in your work or pub games? Share in the comments below.

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I’m sure all of my readers love meetings. If you’re like me, you wake up looking forward to people who forget they’re on mute, people who forget to go on mute before yelling at pets/neighbors/unpleasant BMs, and of course what I call Cisco Standard Time (“We’ll get started about 5 minutes late because everyone before us did.”).

But for those of you who want to make a difference, I thought I’d share some ideas to help you make the most of your meeting time, whether you’re running a meeting, participating in one, or thinking you’d rather get a few more root canals and maybe a vertebra replacement instead of going to another conference call.

Caveat: I work remotely (not to be confused with remotely working), so a lot of my recent thoughts on this topic are focused around Webex or other conference call methods. I hope they’ll help you with face-to-face meetings as well, but don’t count on hitting mute in a conference room to save you from your woes.

I’ll start with an anecdote. I worked for a search engine company about 13 years ago, and one of the CEOs during my time there made an interesting observation. He walked around our San Francisco office and saw meeting rooms full most of the time. Many/most of the people in the meeting rooms were disengaged, and people couldn’t justify the meetings to him in many cases. So a mandate went out, a decree from on high, telling people to cut back on meetings and trim down the attendees. It was one of the wisest admonitions from a CEO that I’ve ever been in the room to hear first-hand. And it seemed to work. (The company failed later for other reasons, but nobody who left the company thought “if we’d only had a few more meetings each day, we would’ve made it.”)Continue reading →

For the fourth year, I’m spending a week’s vacation in Las Vegas attending Interop. What started with Stephen Foskett inviting me to participate in a Tech Field Day Roundtable at Interop 2013 has become a tradition, thanks to the courtesy of Interop PR. I’ve experienced all four hotels in the Mandalay strip, learned the secret identity of airline chicken, and met some great people with great projects and products and the occasional interesting vending machines.

YOU CAN’T SEE MY HAT

My coworkers were in large part confused that I would take vacation time, come to Las Vegas mostly on my own dime[1], and act like I don’t have a day job. When I did things like this during my employment with Disney, I’d “leave my ears at home,” as I did for the Tech Field Day events. Cisco doesn’t have iconic ears, and I don’t have a bridge hat (as Teren Bryson suggested yesterday). But I still leave work behind.

You’re not going to be able to leave your experience and expertise behind, of course, and there are enough folks out there who know who I work for, but my work phone, work laptop, work business cards, and work identity[2] are left behind for the duration of an event like this.

Last month I managed to attend a big data event as an attendee, for the first time in nearly two years. One upside to being a big data storyteller is that you don’t get 3am oncall pages. Downsides at events like Strata include that you’re often working the booth, or preparing for and recovering from a presentation, or trying to convince vendors that your role doesn’t involve buying software and services for a Fortune 50 company personally.

Sure, I did give a brief booth presentation for my friends at MapR on both expo days at Strata SJ, but more time was spent catching up with the people in my ecosystem who I rarely see, learning what they’re doing new these days (or who they’re working for these days), and occasionally getting a no-BS perspective on a very rife-for-BS idea, product, or company.

One of the other upsides to not being a buyer anymore is that it is easy, and practical, to jettison the sales pitches and move on to the stories. I tell stories. I don’t deploy production environments anymore. And it’s refreshing to be able to look at things outside the sales pressure.

HADOOP IS OVER…

So the first point, which was teased at Strata NYC last fall, is that Hadoop is finally over…

Earlier this week Nutanix put out a video campaign against VCE. Many people found it inappropriate or unacceptable. Many people didn’t find it inappropriate or unacceptable. But it offended a very visible contingent of the Internet tech community.

And a bunch of people on Twitter decided to fight inappropriate and unacceptable with the same. For example:

I was told on Twitter last night that “as a father” made this comment acceptable and respectable. Reminded me of the Jenny McCarthy “as a mother” fiasco a few years ago.

There was another tweet telling Nutanix execs that they’d better plan to work in fast food soon… but it looks like that was deleted since last night. If that’s the case, kudos to the poster for thinking better of it. And kudos to Howard Ting, Nutanix’s marketing SVP, for his creative response to that particular tweet.

I was also informed last night on Twitter that being disappointed with this sort of discourse meant I was “white-knighting,” and that an offensive ad campaign was perfect justification for immaturity in return.

The “white knight” term seems to be a popular way of dismissing any disagreement these days, although I hope that ceases to be the case someday. The fellow who made that accusation also accused me of not having a leg to stand on in my position because I stopped arguing with him. Sometimes you just can’t win.

So what’s your point?

Is it really too much to ask, that we keep the level of discourse a bit above what we’re allegedly (i.e. when it’s convenient or attractive or beneficial to us) trying to discourage in others? I don’t think so. As a father, as a technologist, as a human, I don’t think so. And if I’m in the Internet Minority on this, I’m disappointed but okay with it on my side.

I was impressed with a couple of the responses that came from people who missed the memo that they were expected (or even required) to be offended.

As a fem,I wasn't offended by #NixVblock videos-more offensive for males to mask a competitive response as standing up 4 females everywhere

The blog post linked in that second tweet is a worthwhile read, although I expect it will be attacked promptly by Nutanix’s competitors and various other people who thrive on feeling outraged.

Nutanix could have done a milder campaign, and I understand they’ve done so already. Should they have started with that? Maybe. Would it have had the same impact? Probably not.

Would it have inconvenienced people looking for something to be outraged about, if they’d started with the new version? Not for long; this is the Internet as you know. Are there hidden (or not-so-hidden) agendas at work in the outrage? I’ll let you decide on that. Will anyone remember this in two months? Other than the folks who are now setting a calendar reminder to stir the pot in two months… probably not.

But those of us with genuine concern about the impressions and realities of sexism, racism, and anythingelse-ism in tech need to take the high road whenever possible. Having a proven history of fertility and/or adoption does not exempt us from being civil. Nor does having a certification, a job, or a social media account. It may not be easy at all times, but change is rarely easy.

Didn’t you have a booth babe thought to share too?

Yes, thanks for reminding me while I still have my asbestos Speedo(tm) on. For that image, you’re welcome.

The blog linked above suggests that people should express outrage about promotional models or “booth babes.”

While I agree with that concern, and I don’t stop at booths that are overwhelmingly ‘babed, there’s a right way and a wrong way to address this issue as well.

I was disappointed to hear some folks at a recent professional trade expo cheerfully and proudly insulting the models themselves, some even claiming knowledge of the models’ alleged (unlikely) alternate professions and sexual proclivities. One or two people I overheard were even thrilled to insult a technologically aware person in a booth who simply made the mistake of being an attractive woman in tech.

The white-knight-decrying fellow can pipe up here if he likes, but insulting or attacking the models themselves–or anyone at a trade show for that matter–will not help your cause or do anyone else any good. Complain politely and professionally to the vendor in question if you want change to happen. Calling the model something you wouldn’t call a person in your family (or that you wouldn’t want someone in your family called) just puts you farther in the wrong than the vendor you’re trying to be outraged at.

Disclosure: I have some people I consider friends over at Nutanix, and I have been a guest at their office for Tech Field Day and just as a friend of the company. However, I don’t have any pigs in the fire on this market at the moment, and nobody has asked or enticed me to write this or given any consideration for this post. And I do have a relative who is a part-time promotional model, albeit in the fashion/club/media world, not the tech world.

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Welcome to RSTS11…

I’m a 17 year veteran of Silicon Valley/Bay Area system administration, now retired from doing Real Work(tm). I’ve done networks, storage, IT, operations, caffeine procurement, and just about anything else that plugs in or acts like it. I’ve worked in 149-person and 149,000-person companies.

Today I work for Cisco designing solutions and telling stories around big data and analytics. See the links above for disclosures and caveats to my coverage here.

My thoughts here are my own, and should not be taken to represent any company or entity other than me.